“Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” captured the sexual politics of an entire age, for better and worse.

“Becky With the Good Hair” instantly entered both the language and the American cultural bestiary. There is no 21st century pop artist who captures the morals and sentiments of the country as unfailingly as she does. She is proof that the monoculture dies hard or might not die after all.īeyonce is taken as a reflection of who we are, meaning that to assail her is to assail ourselves. To analyze her threatens to ruin the magic, and the magic itself is a key element of whatever shared culture the public still has left. For once-countercultural Pitchfork, Beyonce can only be praised and celebrated. A great deal of establishment reporting on major policy areas is indistinguishable from the output of the comms shop of the national committee of a single political party. “Her global reach is a reminder that Beyonce, the billionaire pop icon, does not and could not exist in a vacuum.”

She has done all of this “while making clear that she’s intensely focused on celebrating the long legacy of black musicians and artists, of which she is a part and beacon,” per Pitchfork. Relatedly, the Pitchfork review for Beyonce’s new album Renaissance helpfully reminds us that the former Destiny’s Child frontwoman has launched a fashion line, released a record with her husband Jay-Z, produced a short film, and voiced a character in a (horrific) live-action remake of The Lion King since 2016’s Lemonade, her last solo album and one of the monuments of 2010s pop culture. Beyonce and Hillary Clinton both nae nae’d in front of large audiences sometime in 2015, a fact that seems to explain everything and nothing about our current predicament.

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